Ethical Dilemma and Narrative Strategies in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly (1988 and 2017)

• Main Authors: Zhang, Xin, He, Shumin
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: Butterfly Lovers; counter-narration; ethical dilemma; M. Butterfly; unreliable narration
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss42/4; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/2065/viewcontent/KK_2042_2C_202023_204_20Regular_20section_20__20Zhang_20and_20He.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1988), the first play written by an Asian American playwright to win the Tony Awards, remains his most renowned and controversial play. The play has been criticized for catering to mainstream discourse for reproducing the rather negative “Dragon Lady” stereotype in the name of subverting the “Madame Butterfly” stereotype. However, with the unreliable narration, the play connotes dual narrative dynamics which creates great aesthetic tension and powerful ironic effect. But such a rhetorical device has, to some extent, also led to the alienation between the play’s representing strategies and the implied author’s intention, which results in heated scholarly debates and misreading. In 2017, the play was revised by Hwang and restaged on Broadway. The revival not only incorporates the Chinese folklore of Butterfly Lovers but also gives more voice to the Asian protagonist who has been silenced in the original version, in order to more explicitly counter the unreliable narrator’s Western centric narrative, which helps establish a more complex character image. The revival further exposes the obstinacy of racist mentality and Orientalist narrative discourse in American mainstream culture, responding to the misreading and criticisms on the original version in ways that advance with the times. Through different narrative strategies in the two versions of M. Butterfly, Hwang tries to guide the audience to get rid of the racist paradigm to better understand the representing strategies and ethics of Asian American literatures.